


Clean Teeth & Icecream

by msross



Category: Left 4 Dead (Video Games)
Genre: Found Family, Hurt/Comfort, Mildly detailed description of vomiting, Zoey & Francis relationship study, Zoey-centric, as friends :), i am a sucker for zoey wump, i jsut like these two, just a tad bit of wump, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 08:20:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29204235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/msross/pseuds/msross
Summary: “You know what I miss?” Francis mutters, crouches down to sit in front of the mattress, sit with her, “Ice cream,”Zoey hits her head a little too hard, and it hurts way more than it should. Francis is there to dish out some comfort, because he's amazing at that.
Relationships: Zoey (Left 4 Dead) & Francis (Left 4 Dead)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	Clean Teeth & Icecream

**Author's Note:**

> holy shit this is not good at all and rushed i am so sorry also this is all purely platonic
> 
> please forgive me i have never attempted a hurt/comfort fic before

She pops her fingers, rolls her wrist; picks at a scab on her thumb. It’s dark, so dark she can barely see her hands in front of her- thin bands on moonlight sneak in from the shuttered window, paint the room a dim blue. Her bones are tired, tired and old and so much older than the mere nineteen years they’ve actually walked this planet. She slouches back on the thin mattress, blood stained and grimy and probably full of piss-knows-what.

She can’t see the church around, below her, but she sure can smell it. She can smell the stink of bile coating the walls and the guts and gore they spilled all over the floor and pews; smell the stench of death, the smell of those who prayed to a god they thought would provide sanctuary, those who were wrong and paid dearly for their mistake.

She feels it too; feels the screams and sorrows of those who died here, those they slaughtered here. She wants to lie to herself, say she doesn’t care, say the feeling that beats at her chest is just simple apathy, but she does, she cares a lot. Her and her boys do not kill zombies, they kill the sick. They kill the infected. They move and they move fast, and they kill as they go, flitting from state to state with more and more blood on their hands.

It takes her hitting her head a little too hard for Bill to finally stop them, stop their killing, stop their walking.

Zoey wakes up in a bell tower to herself vomiting, spewing out a cocktail of half-digested canned fruit and beans onto the wood of the floor and the old man shoving an undecipherable amount of fingers in her face; the world around her is fuzzy, garbled, and her ears hurt and her eyes hurt and her everything hurts.

“Concussion,” he says to no one in particular; he’s hunched over her, so close, too close perhaps, but he’s Bill so it’s alright and the boys are sat in one corner or another, chattering away over a tin of probably spoiled SpaghettiOs, “So long ‘s she don’t bonk her head again, she ain’t leavin’ us just yet.”

“Yeah? Does this mean we can stop hauling ass, old man?”

He leans on his arm for a moment, pushes himself up, lets his gaze slide to Francis; the scowl he gives him is pinched tight, his nose upturned – Bill language for “shut up, Francis.” The world still spins before her, and she might be already on the ground but she feels as if she’s about to topple over, and the movement from the older man makes it worse.

Francis flashes him a stupid Francis Grin (as she had so lovingly nicknamed them) and his eyebrow quirks up a bit and Louis smacks his arm lightly, but she knows it’s all in good fun (it always is with Louis).

The words that follow are soft mumbles in the back of her ears – and she’s a bit scared ‘cause she can’t tell if they’re talking quietly or if she _just can’t hear them_ ; they talk and talk and talk and yet they seem too far away for her to really _hear_.

And the almost-silence cradles her, sifts her into a half-conscious state within less than a few minutes as her head droops and she rubs her eyes; she’s nauseous and hurting and tired, by god she’s tired and she thinks she feels herself slipping into sleep and waking up and _sleeping,_ and the hours bleed together into a flurry of darkness and churches and dreams and then she opens her eyes to Francis.

Bill and Louis are nowhere in sight, and the door is barred yet not barricaded (they never leave it unbarricaded, unless it’s time to leave. Is it time to get up and walk again? To kill again?).

She thinks she sleepily lets a few words slip from her lips, quiet and getting quieter but her ears are still stuffed with cotton and she can barely hear herself and _oh_ ,

“Sorry, pintsized. Old man’ll freakin’ kill me if you end up dying under my watch,” his voice is gruff and low and stupid and so Francis-like and she hears _him_. Zoey hears Francis, of all people, clearly for the first time in hours.

It takes a few minutes of lying there for her to fully wake up – she’s still hurting but her senses are coming back and christ almighty, she smells so bad right now; if she had less self-control she probably would’ve vomited just because of how bad _she_ smelled.

“ _Whre’s Bill_?” Her words are slurred together and her ‘where’ sounds a bit like it’s missing an e but she’s proud of herself for trying, for being about to fight through the tiredness and fuzziness and nauseousness.

“Him and sunshine-shit went out to find more soup, beans. Hopefully beans, I’m sick of goddamn canned spaghetti.”

She breathes in, breathes out; wants to come up with a snarky response but her brain is too jumbled to come up with one, breathes in again, curls around herself on the mattress. Paws at her head a bit; holy shit balls, it hurts, a stabbing pressure behind her eyes, in her ears, and she feels like if she moves wrong her whole ear canal will explode. She mumbles, mumbles how it hurts, babbles under her breath to herself like some sort of deranged toddler, and before she knows it the words “ _’miss him_ ,” slip out, and she doesn’t even realize she says it because it bleeds into a kaleidoscope of unintelligible words and sounds. She sweats on the mattress (oh god, she’s got a fever or some shit now doesn’t she) and sits there, filling the silence with her own weird Zoey mumbles.

“You know what I miss?” Francis mutters, crouches down to sit in front of the mattress, sit with _her_ , “ _Ice cream_ ,” and even though her brain feels a mite too stupid right now to _really_ process it, she can tell it’s a joke and she _laughs_. She laughs and giggles and stops mumbling because of Francis and ice cream even though it still hurts and it’s a stupid goddamn joke.

And through a snort she murmurs out a quiet, “That’s _stupid_.”

“Yer stupid, and yet you don’t see _me_ makin’ comments about _you.”_

“Your ice cream ‘iss _stup’d_.”

He sucks in air, gapes his mouth like a fish outta water, hits his chest dramatically with his left hand, throws up his right.

“I take offense to that!”

She laughs, laughs again, laughs a little too hard until the pain slams into her like a truck and she lets out this miserable, high-pitched squawk not unlike that of a goddamn chicken and she wraps her arms around herself and wants to scream. She blinks, lets her hands glide up to her skull and rub the skin around her temples as she tries to settle down again but it just keeps _coming_. The pain flits into her head like waves, flowing in and in and in towards her temples, behind her eyes and then steadily rising, only to fall in on themselves and suddenly they crest and she _shrieks_.

Her scream is long and stretched thin and too high-pitched to be coming outta her and causes Francis to practically jump outta his skin right before her eyes; she pushes at her forehead, hits at her skull, and in a flurry of movement there’s another body behind her, holding her hands away from her body and oh god it _hurts_ and her vocal cords just keep going.

“Jesus! Was my joke really _that_ bad?” She pries her hand away from the figure’s fingers, smashes her fist at its chest. Why are they so goddamn loud? They gotta have burst one of her eardrums by now.

“Okay, okay! It’s time to calm down, twerp! Yer screamin’ is so loud that the old man can probably hear you _on the other side of town_!”

The air floods with a mix of her sobs and wails, and had there not been four walls surrounding them currently the whole town would be on their asses in less than a minute.

Her world spins, she blinks and the lines blur and the church blurs until it’s nothing but jagged shapes and dull colors and there’s someone still behind her, warmth radiating behind her back and reaching into her core and slithering its way around her chest; it’s a comforting heat but she’s not comforted and she wants keep screeching but a hand glides up to cover her lips and she _can’t_.

She shakes, whole body shivers that wrack her figure, slip up from her head down to her toes and she _trembles,_ blinks, tries to draw the hand away from her mouth, pulls at it with her fingers and keeps pulling and failing until she’s just twitching and her head hurts less and the warmth becomes comforting and the minutes bleed together.

It takes her a few minutes (a few minutes for what? She doesn’t know); nothing is coherent, nothing is comprehensible to her and the world is grey and brown and she sits on a pair of legs, and there’s a chest against her back. And there he is, in all of his glory, sat behind her and holding her with his hands over her mouth and he’s blurry and she’s blurry and she lays her shaky hands on his arm and he steadies her.

It hurts still, throbs a bit in her temples and above her neck, and she sits there, Francis wrapped around her, she squeezes his arm, stops squealing; he gently (with all of the care a brute six foot five biker can) removes his hand from her mouth, and she _breathes_.

“You done with yer little temper tantrum, pipsqueak?”

She doesn’t respond. She sits there, silently, as the world fades back into view. Darkness still blankets them; there’s a table shoved into one of the corners. She thinks she can see mold growing in the ceiling just above her. She breathes.

She presses her fingers into his arm, grips him a little tighter. He curls further around her, lets his chin rest on her head.

They sit like that, surrounded by darkness and silence, as the minutes bleed together, soft and wrapped around them like lace fittings.

The silence is only broken by a quiet, “ _I miss_ ,”

She breathes it out, works up the courage to finish it, _finishes_ it “I miss brushing my teeth.”

“Clean teeth, huh? That’s pretty dumb, compared to ice cream.” She shrugs into him, tired and hurting and just plain _sleepy_.

“’M breath stinks. Mint ‘ss shit but I’d take it over the aftertaste ‘f beans any day.”

He pauses for a minute, leans back against the wall, taps his thumb to his chin in an ‘I’m thinking’ way, responds with a gruff,

“You know what I don’t miss? Bill. He’s a stupid grouchy old man, maybe he’ll come back with something other than spaghetti. I’m starting to hate SpaghettiO’s.”

“… okay, Francis.”

She’s quiet for the rest of the night; she sits there, slouched against his chest as her head pounds and she sleeps and wakes and _sleeps_. Bill comes back, finds them like that. Louis probably gives Francis some shit for it; and they stay in that church for almost three days, she thinks.

There’s still a beating in her head and a pressure behind her eyes as they leave; she promises Bill she’ll be careful so they can finally vamoose and get on the road, even though she’s concussed and probably shouldn’t even be moving.

They leave; they leave and draw their guns and shoot and _kill_. They kill the sick, the ill, the infected, and her head hurts constantly, and it’s never going to be okay, but perhaps it’s a little more bearable when Francis sleeps a tad bit closer to her than normal for a while.


End file.
